Colour The Sky – Alive

When one is pressed to name Australia’s biggest musical exports, one may be pushed to name more than a handful, especially in the arena of pop-punk. Taking the Stateside sheen to the Antipodes, Colour The Sky here make a pretty limp entry in what, to my knowledge, must be a fairly empty volume of Australian pop-punk heritage.

Musically, Colour The Sky sit somewhere between the dance-oriented grooves of The Audition and the pre-original lineup reunion releases of Taking Back Sunday basically pop-punk at its most inoffensive, this rocks gently without ever really taking hold. The real meat of this album comes in the first three tracks, “What Makes You Sweat” especially impressing with its bouncy bit and gigantic riffs. Then come the ballads. So. Many. Ballads. For a band from Australia they don’t seem particularly proud of it – one ballad is a ode to the Big Apple (“And We’ll See (NYC) (see what they did there? Wink wink, nudge nudge)), and another, “Friction”, makes a brief nod to their hometown of Perth, before heading off onto a plane to “sunny California” Despite the relative quality of the opening gambit, this album resolutely sticks to mid-tempo drudgery.

Penultimate track “Sharp Claws & Weak Paws” is a brief respite from the preceding tracks that are so cheesy even Stinking Bishop would blush, but its the petty lyrics about small-town gossip queens that spoil it somewhat. This would have made a decent EP with the first track and “Not A Thing You Can Do”, admittedly a treat amongst the meandering mid-section, but as a full-length, it’s so anodyne and saccharine I feared my teeth would fall out at any moment. I doubt if tomorrow I’ll even remember a single chorus.

Ollie Connors